VISJET-a computer ocean outfall modelling system

Sewage and industrial effluents from coastal cities are often discharged into the adjacent sea after some land-based treatment. In modern design, the wastewater is often discharged in buoyant jet groups from risers mounted on a submarine outfall on the seabed to achieve rapid mixing of effluents with tidal flow. A mathematical model for buoyant jets in currents based on the Lagrangian models, called JETLAG, was developed. The paper presents a system called VISJET, for visualizing the ocean sewage discharge system based on the JETLAG model. We discuss the features of VISJET system and show how computer visualization can be used to help with the design of an ocean sewage discharge system.published_or_final_versio

Segmentation of Unstructured Datasets

Datasets generated by computer simulations and experiments in Computational Fluid Dynamics tend to be extremely large and complex. It is difficult to visualize these datasets using standard techniques like Volume Rendering and Ray Casting. Object Segmentation provides a technique to extract and quantify regions of interest within these massive datasets. This thesis explores basic algorithms to extract coherent amorphous regions from two-dimensional and three-dimensional scalar unstructured grids. The techniques are applied to datasets from Computational Fluid Dynamics and from Finite Element Analysis

Direct volume rendering of unstructured grids

This paper investigates three categories of algorithms for direct volume rendering of unstructured grids, which are image-space, object-space, and hybrid methods. We propose three new algorithms. Cell Projection algorithm, which falls into object-space category, is capable of rendering non-convex meshes through a simple yet efficient sorting schema that exploits both image and object space coherencies. Existing hybrid methods use object-then-image traversal order that enforces the processing of each cell. Thus, these algorithms perform redundant operations and do not support early ray termination. We propose a hybrid method, called Span-Buffer Ray Casting (SBRC), that can support early ray termination discarding redundant operations by employing image-then-object traversal order. Another hybrid method, called Koyamada-SBRC (K-SBRC), is proposed with the motivation of refining image-space and hybrid methods to extract the best features of them. This method is developed by blending SBRC approach with Koyamada's algorithm, which is an efficient image-space algorithm. All proposed algorithms are capable of handling acyclic non-convex meshes and generating images of acceptable quality. SBRC and K-SBRC algorithms have the additional capabilities of rendering cyclic meshes and supporting early ray termination. The proposed algorithms and Koyamada's algorithm are implemented and experimented in a common framework for analyzing their relative performance. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Parallel volume ray-casting for unstructured-grid data on distributed-memory architectures

As computing technology continues to advance, computational modeling of scientific and engineering problems produces data of increasing complexity: large in size and unstructured in shape. Volume visualization of such data is a challenging problem. This paper proposes a distributed parallel solution that makes ray-casting volume rendering of unstructured-grid data practical. Both the data and the rendering process are distributed among processors. At each processor, ray-casting of local data is performed independent of the other processors. The global image composing processes, which require inter-processor communication, are overlapped with the local ray-casting processes to achieve maximum parallel efficiency. This algorithm differs from previous ones in four ways: it is completely distributed, less view-dependent, reasonably scalable, and flexible. Without using dynamic load balancing, test results on the Intel Paragon using from two to 128 processors show, on average, about 60% parallel efficiency

Virtual light fields for global illumination in computer graphics

This thesis presents novel techniques for the generation and real-time rendering of globally illuminated environments with surfaces described by arbitrary materials. Real-time rendering of globally illuminated virtual environments has for a long time been an elusive goal. Many techniques have been developed which can compute still images with full global illumination and this is still an area of active flourishing research. Other techniques have only dealt with certain aspects of global illumination in order to speed up computation and thus rendering. These include radiosity, ray-tracing and hybrid methods. Radiosity due to its view independent nature can easily be rendered in real-time after pre-computing and storing the energy equilibrium. Ray-tracing however is view-dependent and requires substantial computational resources in order to run in real-time. Attempts at providing full global illumination at interactive rates include caching methods, fast rendering from photon maps, light fields, brute force ray-tracing and GPU accelerated methods. Currently, these methods either only apply to special cases, are incomplete exhibiting poor image quality and/or scale badly such that only modest scenes can be rendered in real-time with current hardware. The techniques developed in this thesis extend upon earlier research and provide a novel, comprehensive framework for storing global illumination in a data structure - the Virtual Light Field - that is suitable for real-time rendering. The techniques trade off rapid rendering for memory usage and precompute time. The main weaknesses of the VLF method are targeted in this thesis. It is the expensive pre-compute stage with best-case O(N^2) performance, where N is the number of faces, which make the light propagation unpractical for all but simple scenes. This is analysed and greatly superior alternatives are presented and evaluated in terms of efficiency and error. Several orders of magnitude improvement in computational efficiency is achieved over the original VLF method. A novel propagation algorithm running entirely on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is presented. It is incremental in that it can resolve visibility along a set of parallel rays in O(N) time and can produce a virtual light field for a moderately complex scene (tens of thousands of faces), with complex illumination stored in millions of elements, in minutes and for simple scenes in seconds. It is approximate but gracefully converges to a correct solution; a linear increase in resolution results in a linear increase in computation time. Finally a GPU rendering technique is presented which can render from Virtual Light Fields at real-time frame rates in high resolution VR presentation devices such as the CAVETM